Earthquake Reflections III - The Eco-City

Last Friday I spent a couple of hours wandering around some of the eastern suburbs of Christchurch (Woolston, Phillipstown, Linwood, Avonside, South Brighton) with my friend Michael, looking at and taking photos of the resources available in public parks. Resources which communities could have made better use of in the recent earthquake emergency, or could develop further so as to make life more pleasant now, and more bearable in emergencies. I was checking out my notion that an 'eco retrofit' of the city's parks would be the cheapest and most effective thing the city could do to ensure that every community has a safe and sanitary 'emergency centre' to use whenever built infrastructure and reticulated services fail – with the added bonus that making parks into stronger community centres now would improve community cohesion and capacity and increase resilience at all times. 

In Woolston we saw that a large tank of water had been placed in Woolston Park near the existing little community centre. This centre has a water fountain in front of it, full of safe, drinkable water (I drank it) coming from a bore which has probably been there for over one hundred years (the park is over a century old).

There was a large industrial water tanker outside the Phillipstown community centre next to Phillipstown school. The school site dates from the nineteenth century, and it would have had its own well then. The next park we came to, Beverley Park beside the Avon River, has also been there a long time, and the water from its fountain was clean and clear. 

A little further along the river we passed the entrance to Avonside Drive, now closed to all but residents of the one of the most badly affected areas. Just along from that corner is the Wilding Park Tennis Centre, where community showers were being offered – presumably with water from the centre's own well.

The water fountain in Woodham Park next door was working, but the toilets were not. They had signs on the doors saying that they had yet to be inspected. 

At South New Brighton Park the toilets were boarded up for safety reasons, but there was fresh drinking water, and a gas barbecue and picnic table.

So if one had food one could safely cook it and eat it there, and wash it down with safe water. However, as none of these parks had food gardens, there was no food on hand to cook. The next day I went to a birthday party in Addington, and on the way back I stopped to take photos of the tranquil and productive little community garden in Strickland St, which is one of the very few community gardens in Christchurch to be on publicly-owned (council) land.

Although the roads all around were very humpy and bumpy (and had been very silty) and the nearest shopping centre in Selwyn St was totally cordoned off, in the garden seed was being saved, winter veges were coming on, and compost was being made. Tons of it – this garden processes a phenomenal amount of kitchen waste from nearby houses. 

I thought about how water and land are currently being neglected or misused, and how - with very little extra effort and money - much more could be made of these existing urban resources if they are valued for what they are truly worth, and further developed as community assets.

I have put my thoughts up on The Eco-City page on this blog, and welcome your comments on this subject.

Preserve du jour - Roasted Blackboy Peach Chutney

One rainy Sunday - four different preserves

At this time of year it is a race against nature to capture the late-ripening fruit in jars. I was glad it was too wet to garden today as it made me feel better about staying inside and making tomato and herb puree (9 jars), lemon chilli chutney (2 jars), grape jelly (5 small jars), and roasted blackboy peach chutney (5 jars).

This last one is my own invention - driven by the necessity of finding a more interesting way of preserving the huge amount of fruit from my three trees.
I guessed that roasting the peaches would intensify the peach flavour of the chutney, and this does seem to be the case.

Two lucky readers of this blog (one in Auckland, one in Hamilton - you know who you are) are going to get a jar to test for themselves when I visit them next week, so perhaps they will give an independent assessment of how tasty it is.

ROASTED BLACKBOY PEACH CHUTNEY

Ingredients

enough blackboy peach halves to cover a large roasting pan in one layer

(around 40)

2 onions, peeled and chopped

200g brown sugar

250 ml malt vinegar

1 cinnamon stick

10 whole cloves

½ t ground cinnamon

½ t chilli powder

½ t salt

Method

Heat the oven to 240 C.

Skin the blackboy peaches (by putting a few at a time in a shallow bowl,

pouring boiling water over them and letting them stand for a few minutes

until the skins are easily loosened and slipped off when nicked with a sharp knife).

Halve the peaches, remove the stones, and place them in one layer in a large roasting pan.

Mix the chopped onions in with the peaches.

Roast the peaches and onions at a high heat for 30-40 minutes,

until there is no longer any juice in the pan and the peaches have shrunk.

Weigh the roasted peach/onion mix - there should be around 1 kg.

Put the peach/onion mix into a large, heavy-bottomed pot.

For every 900-1100 grams of peach/onion mix, add the sugar, vinegar and spices

in the amounts given above.

Adjust them up or down if the peach/onion mix weight is significantly heavier or lighter.

Bring the pot to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer slowly, stirring often,

until the mixture is thick (about 30 minutes).

Remove the cinnamon stick and bottle the chutney in hot, sterilised glass jars.

Seal at once.

Korimako love feasting on karamu

A korimako (bellbird) in a karamu bush in the Eco Forest

Do you want more bellbirds in your autumn garden? Then plant karamu. Karamu are in the Coprosma genus, and New Zealand is Coprosma Central, with nearly half of all Coprosma species being endemic to New Zealand. The genus ranges from small shrubs to little trees. In the large shrub/small tree category are C. robusta and C. lucida, both known as karamu (as is C. rhamnoides). These shrubs are easily mistaken for each other, as they all have glossy leaves in the same tone of green, and colourful orange-red berries in autumn.

Coprosmas are (distantly) related to the coffee bush, and I have read of the early Pakeha settlers attempting to make drinkable coffee from coprosma berries – but I never read that anyone ever said it was any good. In the nineteenth century a variety of Maori medicinal uses for various species of coprosma were recorded (see New Zealand Medicinal Plants by S. Brooker, R. Cambie and R. Cooper). I was told about this myself in 1986 by a Tuhoe tohunga. He was pointing out the different medicinal parts of manono or papaumu (C. australis). I remember him emphasising that it was important to gather bark to be used medicinally from the north side of the trunk.

These days, the main reasons why anyone would want to give karamu a place in their garden is because the bushes provide such wonderful food for bellbirds. It is a good shrub to plant for low shelter on garden boundaries, especially suitable for a northern boundary as it will not block the sun. It is evergreen so provides good privacy all year – with the added bonus of happy chortling bellbirds in March and April.

 Members of the karamu family of coprosmas 

have glossy leaves and colourful berries.

The vege garden at the autumn equinox

The east side of the main
vege garden - note the
new compost bins at the
back. Growing here are
leeks, basil, lettuces,
zucchini, silverbeet,
celery, yacon, cabbages,
herbs, and a self-sown tomato
plant.

The west side of the garden,
with dry corn stalks, 
fat pumpkins, carrots,
beans, broccoli, lettuce,
cauliflowers, silverbeet 
and potatoes.







The equinox, that twice yearly point in time and space when the tilt of the axis of the Earth is inclined neither away from nor towards the sun, has just passed. (At thirty-nine minutes before midnight last night, to be precise.) In New Zealand our part of the earth is now turning further away from the sun, the first of the deciduous trees to change colour are putting on tints of red and yellow, and the sweetcorn stalks are starting to go dry and brown and rattly. I must hurry and compost them, along with some rather ripe horse manure, in my brand new compost bins. (Made of recycled corrugated iron and fence posts – thanks, Martin!)

If Ken Ring the Really Wrong earthquake and weather 'predictor' were around I would happily compost him too – he's full of manure, and excess carbon. (Just how wrong he is, on both counts, and why, has been clearly and comprehensively explained by science blogger David Winter - see Ken Ring Can't Predict the Weather and Ken Ring Can't Predict Earthquakes Either. )

I hope I have planted enough leeks, silverbeet, cabbage, cauliflowers and broccoli to see us through the next few months. If not, it's too late now. But I can still do pak choy, rocket and other tough greens. At least there will lots of pumpkin, and hopefully enough spuds. Self-reliance in onions and carrots is next year's challenge.

The weather is not cold yet, and the zucchini and basil are still growing well. All the seasonal fruits are at their peak as well. Every weekend for the past three weeks I have bottled more tomato and herb puree, and I have also made pear and raisin chutney and tomato sauce. Now the blackboy peaches are almost ripe, and the quinces are going golden. If only getting into town and finding a place that sells bottling supplies weren't such a major mission these days! But many people in town would rather have my problems than their own at present, so whenever I leave our valley I take some of the seasonal surplus, raw or preserved, and share it around.

 A surplus of butter beans and basil is a fine thing to have.

Soba Noodle Salad with Roasted Vegetables

Some of the ingredients for Soba Noodle Salad with Roasted Vegetables

Last week my teenage niece Aleks stayed for a day and night. She was making her slow way back to Christchurch, after being evacuated to Little River for almost two weeks because her bedroom was not safe to sleep in after the earthquake.

Damage to a bedroom wall in Aleks' (1870s double brick cottage) home.

Aleks is fond of both pasta and Japanese food, so I put the two together and made her a noodle and roasted vegetable salad, using soba noodles, which are made mainly of buckwheat and have a distinctive flavour. She liked it so much she took the leftovers home with her.

This is an easy recipe, with lots of room for improvisation and substitution in vegetables and flavourings. I have simplified it from a more authentic Japanese version, which involves preparing the vegetables in two different ways rather than roasting them all together, or roasting them with tamari, wine and vinegar. I think doing it this way gives the veges more flavour - while a free hand with the sesame oil in the dressing does no harm either. Plus the heat in the recipe (fresh chilli or red pepper flakes) can also be adjusted to taste.

SOBA NOODLE SALAD with ROASTED VEGETABLES

(serves 3-4)

Ingredients

1 onion, thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1T fresh ginger, very finely chopped

around 400g of tender vegetables

Choose as many as possible from

baby green beens OR butter beans

snow peas

asparagus

beet stems

pak choy

mushrooms

courgettes

capsicums

eggplant

2 T peanut oil

salt to taste

1 t dark sesame oil

2 T tamari

4 T rice wine OR dry sherry

2 T rice vinegar

400g soba (Japanese buckwheat) noodles

3 spring onions, finely sliced

1 small red chilli, very finely chopped OR 1 t red pepper flakes

5-6 T coriander leaves OR Thai basil leaves, coarsely chopped

Dressing:

1 T sesame oil

2 T rice vinegar

1 T tamari

Method

Heat the oven to 200 C.

Prepare the vegetables – wash and trim them (beans, snow peas) and/or slice them into small pieces.

Heat the oil in a large roasting pan, and stir-fry the onion, garlic and ginger for one minute.

Add the sliced vegetables, and stir them well to coat them with the oil.

Sprinkle them with salt and mix again.

Spread them out in one layer in the pan, and roast them at 200 C. for 6-7 minutes.

Mix together the sesame oil, tamari, rice wine OR sherry and rice vinegar.

Pour the mixture over the roasting vegetables, stir them well, and continue roasting them for another 10 minutes or so, until the vegetables are tender and the liquid has evaporated. (Stir as required.)

Cook the noodles in lots of boiling salted water until al dente (around 5 minutes).

Drain them really well and put them in a large bowl.

Add the roasted veges, the sliced spring onions, chopped chilli OR red pepper flakes, and the coriander OR basil leaves.

Add the oil, vinegar and tamari, toss them gently until everything is well-coated,

taste and add more of the dressing ingredients if needed.

Serve at room temperature, garnished with a sprinkling of sesame seeds and sprigs of coriander or basil.

Ugly pumpkin seeks fairy godmother

 My ugly pumpkin, harvested 5 March, 2011.

This pumpkin could well a descendent of the one which was, according to Charles Perrault, turned into a coach so that Cinderella could ride to the ball. The original story of Cinderella is a very ancient one. The good and lovely girl who is harshly treated but wins through in the end has gone by many names over the ages. She is called Cendrillon (''cinders'') in French, and it is in the French version of the story, written by Perrault in 1697, that the pumpkin which is turned into a coach, and the fairy godmother who waves her magic wand to make this happen, make their first appearance in the tale.

The pumpkin in the picture is called Galeux d'Eysines (or Brodé Galeux d'Eysines). Galeux are warts or scabs, brodé is embroidered, and Eysines is a small town close to Bordeaux in south-west France. Now this information isn't a fairy tale! and you can buy the seeds of this heirloom pumpkin (or 'bumpkin' as some wag in the US has named it) from Kings Seeds and other heirloom seed sellers in New Zealand.

It has grown very well for me this year, being the first of the five varieties of pumpkin I planted to reach maturity. It is also the largest and heaviest to date. We guess the weight of the one in the picture to be around 15 kg. There will be plenty of tasty flesh inside when it is cut open, and now that I have lemongrass growing in my glasshouse I will be able to make my favourite pumpkin soup, which has typically Thai flavourings of lemongrass, lime and coconut. Keep watching this space for the recipe...

 The pumpkin in December 2010, when it was but a pup (and I mistakenly thought it was an Australian Butter pumpkin, as its warts had not started to form).

Earthquake Reflections, Part II

On the Garden City

Four days after the earthquake I picked 4 kg of tomatoes,and preserved seven half litre jars of tomato and herb puree.  So we are all set for pasta sauce, come the next emergency!

Last year's 7.1 earthquake in Canterbury was a big, frightening nuisance, but only buildings and roads got hurt. Last week's 6.3 earthquake, occurring after six months of aftershocks (over 4,000 of them, and some as high as 5.1) was a tragedy, with significant loss of life, and huge social, psychological and economic trauma and disruption. I heard a seismologist say on the radio that human beings are perfectly designed and built to withstand the 20,000 km per hour acceleration forces of an earthquake – but the buildings they are in or near may not be. This was surely the case for many of Canterbury's heritage buildings of brick and stone, which were designed for English, not New Zealand, conditions. But it has also turned out to be the case for some much more recently designed and built concrete buildings in Christchurch's CBD, which should have been more resilient.

It will take a while before we find out why they failed, with such horrific consequences, and perhaps the reasons will be unique to each one. However such failures, and what we now know about the vulnerability of the ground that Christchurch stands on, certainly suggest that any rebuilding of the central city would be wise to avoid high-rise concrete buildings for safety reasons. As I have loathed these buildings since they first started going up in my home town, both for their ugliness whether viewed from near or afar, and for their shadow and wind tunnel effects at street level, I am personally looking forward to the rebuild of the CBD using renewable, flexible materials (wood!) and a return to the open, spacious feel that central Christchurch and Colombo St used to have, with wide skies over low buildings – so different from the 'tunnels' of Queen St, Lambton Quay and Willis St, and George and Princes streets.

Commercial buildings in the CBD are only the most visible part of the infrastructure of a modern city, and not even the most important part. Reticulated services - fresh water, sewage/drainage, electric power, telecommunications – are much more important for the well-being of the whole population. Other essentials are reliable food supplies, sanitary solid waste disposal, medical and veterinary services and supplies, and sturdy roads and bridges. 

I have been thinking for some time that for purely ecological reasons we need to completely re-think urban design and service provisions. We can not and should not keep operating on a nineteenth century model of reticulated services which was always ecologically and socially suspect for a number of reasons. These have become even more salient over one hundred years later.

One of the main reasons we can't keep on the way we are now is the huge amount of energy required to keep these services operating, pumping in water and pumping (or trucking) away waste. The earthquake has created a 'short emergency' in Christchurch, where tens of thousands of homes have been cut off from reticulated water and sewage systems, with all the inconvenience and potential hazards that poses. We can cope in the short term because there are large trucks available to move around fresh water and portable toilets – but this is not the solution for the 'long emergency' (in the words of American writer James Howard Kunstler) which New Zealand and other countries are facing as global oil reserves dwindle, coal-burning is (hopefully) cut back to save the climate from further over-heating, and renewable energy sources are insufficient to power expanding reticulated services – including power itself.

Christchurch is lucky in that its electrical energy comes from hydro power – renewable and climate neutral – but it can't afford to waste it. It is also lucky in that it has good artesian water sources throughout the city, and there is still a reasonable amount of good quality land within and beside the city which is suitable for food production. But in the past twenty years the city has encouraged urban sprawl over good quality land (and on places which we now know are vulnerable), and it has privileged the private motor vehicle as the primary mode of access to non-reticulated essential services and goods, such as food (in supermarkets) and medical services. It has effectively discouraged food production within the city limits by allowing in-fill housing without providing public garden and park offsets, by banning the planting of fruit trees on street verges and in public parks, and by making it so difficult to use public land for food gardening. Sports clubs have been allowed to effectively privatise public land with their courts, pitches and club houses, but would-be gardeners are not allowed to fence off their crops.

These policies and practices turn out to be foolish when it comes to coping easily with a short emergency, and they are even more foolish and out-dated when it comes to being resilient in the face of a long emergency. So I have come up with a set of proposals for (re)building a resilient garden city, which would have the effect of increasing acute emergency capacity and resilience in the short term and  provide for stronger ecological and social effects for resilience in the longer term. They are based on the research I have done for my forthcoming book Food@Home, and on research I have been doing (with Shiv Ganesh of Waikato University) on the Transition Towns movement and related initiatives which are trying to build more ecologically and socially resilient communities in the face of peak oil, climate change, financial meltdown and the other big challenges of the twenty-first century. Readers of this blog will not be surprised that many of my solutions start with a garden.

I will be putting a new page on my blog - (Re) Building a Resilient Garden City – to set out these proposals. Please check back next week if you are interested.

Earthquake Reflections, Part I

From the EcoGarden

Flowers for those who lost their lives on February 22, 

and those who were badly injured, 

and those who are suffering losses of every kind.

Although the earthquake one week ago was centred very close to the EcoGarden (perhaps only 5 km away as the kereru flies, and definitely only five km deep) once again our old wooden house (109 years this year), built on massive totara piles and topped with a corrugated iron roof, came through unscathed. All its contents, and its inhabitants, are intact – for which we are very thankful.

This earthquake felt much more violent and scary than the one last September, though. Although less strong on the Richter scale, it started much closer to us, and was more shallow. Apparently the ground acceleration was also faster than the September 2010 quake, although the shaking did not last as long. Quite strong aftershocks keep coming. Martin the EcoForester was out in the forest on Monday morning (six days after the big quake) when a 4 point something hit us, and he could see the trees sway ever so slightly.

But at least the ground we are on is rocky, not sandy, so we have no problems with liquefaction, and we are also well away from potential falling boulders. We also have our own water supply from a spring, and a septic tank for sewage disposal, so no worries there. Our electric power was reconnected only five hours after the big quake, (all praise and honour to the Orion workers), and our (plug-in) phone is also working. So all we lack now, as far as essential services go, is our broadband connection. (All the other households in Port Levy are also cut off from mail, on-line banking and bill-paying, and other essential information receiving and sending.)

Restoring our service is probably a very simple matter of replacing whatever component has failed in the junction box that serves Port Levy, which would take all of ten minutes (after a one hour drive over an undamaged road) but direct customers of Telecom (which has the monopoly power to do any fixing) have their calls taken in Manila, and are told that there are thousands in the queue ahead of them. Also that they can use the free WiFi hot spots in the city, which is a particularly sick joke in the circumstances, with the CBD cordoned off and the roads a mess. My nearest internet source is currently a 12 km drive away, in Diamond Harbour (opposite Lyttelton) over a steep and winding hill road which has been known to rain rocks when the hill is provoked, as it surely has been lately.

I am working up to a major epistolary grump about why and how things have come to this sorry pass, what the implications of it are, and how New Zealand must do better in the future. But at least for me it is mainly just a bloody nuisance, preventing me from getting on with my those parts of my work that involve on-line research and sharing information with colleagues around New Zealand and the world. Not to mention putting up my blog. For others the deprivation may be more serious, since the Web is also a source of support services and other survival-related information.

I can only hope that those people have a phone that works, and electricity to charge or power it – neither of which can be taken for granted. I also hope that they have access to a garden with fresh food in it, to help with their immediate survival needs. My sister in Christchurch was without power or water for several days, and every supermarket within walking or cycling distance of her place (she does not have a car) was too badly damaged to open. Luckily she has a good vege garden on her little section, and when I asked what I could pick up for her from a distant supermarket all she was really hanging out for was things she couldn't grow (bananas, avocados) or make herself (Vogel's bread, catfood).

I have been reflecting on how important gardens are to both individual and household resilience, and to the resilience of whole cities – see my next blog posting - Earthquake Reflections, Part II - On the Garden City.